Les Revenants

Mogwai's soundtrack to the French drama of the same name rarely comes off overly dramatic or leading. While the musical structures are often simple, continually recasting the central motif with xylophone, piano, and guitar, they push individual sounds to disquieting levels.

Featured Tracks:

"Wizard Motor"

—

Mogwai

"Les Revenants" ("the ones who came back"), a French TV program for which Mogwai provides the soundtrack, is a gorgeously subtle, harrowing drama that explores the reality of loved ones returning from the grave. These "zombies" aren't grisly maniacs hungry for flesh, but humans in their pre-death state who return to their tiny community, a twin town to Twin Peaks nestled in the crook of some mountains and swaddled in perpetual night, as if they'd just popped out for air. The soundtrack album Les Revenants contains not a shred of the terror Mogwai is capable of wreaking, and it works terrifically-- it rarely comes off overly dramatic or leading, and matches the unsettling feel of the show.

Mogwai had only seen a few English scripts for the drama before they started on the music. "We were aware of trying to keep it not as a typical soundtrack, more just music that doesn't necessarily do anything that has a bit of presence," guitarist John Cummings told the Quietus. That's underselling it a bit; there's no need to see the TV show (though I'd highly recommend it) to appreciate the subtlety of Mogwai's score. While the musical structures are often simple, continually recasting the motif featured in "Whisky Time"-- which plays as a coach-load of school children crashes over the edge of a winding cliff road in the first episode-- in xylophone, piano, and guitar, they push individual sounds to disquieting levels; the xylophone nursery rhyme-like tinkling that opens "Hungry Face" is so concentrated and piercing that it's quite painful to listen to, trilling at an unholy pitch, and again on "Fridge Magic", where slab-like bass shifts act as the foil to the xylophone's wandering curiosity. The way the repeated motifs falter matches how the presence of the undead in "Les Revenants" makes the electricity fizzle and splutter.

Rather than any of their previous soundtracks, or the highly visual, macabre work of one time Rock Action artist Umberto, Les Revenants often sounds like Clint Mansell's haunting soundtrack to Duncan Jones' (son of David Bowie) existential sci-fi film, Moon-- on the heavy piano and clipped pulse of "Jaguar" in particular. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Mansell said that his soundtrack work was initially heavily influenced by Mogwai, and emphasizes that, when he started, "post-rock and film scoring were almost becoming interchangeable."

In the past couple of years, post-rock has been usurped in the film sync stakes by arpeggiated synthesizer jams with an eye on the past; Kavinsky and Chromatics' work in Drive was a bellwether for the shift. The synthesizers on Les Revenants dominate like monoliths rather than dynamic forces or stylistic turns-- on "This Messiah Needs Watching", a heavy grind anchors the piano's skyward ascent, which reaches a hilt on the only shlocky track, the syrupy "Special N" with its annoyingly tentative, celestial optimism.

Closer "Wizard Motor" is the only point where Mogwai even remotely approach their trademark crusty textures: It plays over the titles of "Les Revenants", where a butterfly pinned inside a case starts to tremble, breaks free of its stake, then smashes the glass, escaping with no clearly indicated destination. That question of what the returned undead do next is key to "Les Revenants"; when a young girl who apparently died in the coach crash returns home, unmarked, her mother tries not to let on that they thought she was dead, and calls the girl's father, who's in the middle of a meeting to plan a memorial for the children.

The only vocal number is a cover of Washington Phillips' gospel standard "What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?" that was originally intended for a tribute album to Jack Rose. The cover has a slightly awkward, hymnal air, as if the words were sung by a secular community given rare cause to sing together. Stuart Braithwaite leads the chorus: "What are they doing in heaven today/ Where sin and sorrow are all done away?" Nobody knows what happens on the other side, but, Mogwai's uneasy, affecting soundtrack implies, what happens when they come back is an even more unnerving prospect. Hardcore will never die, and apparently you might not, either.